8/5/11

In the past I've mentioned how completely impressionable I am. If I see something on TV, on someone's blog or in a restaurant, those things/ideas get stuck in my head and constantly bug me to make them.

This is especially true if those things/ideas remind me of something awesome from my past.

I knew I'd have to make them. First, I love cookies. Second, I love nuts and cherries and chocolate. And third, the combination reminded me of the cookies my friends Jenny, Laura and I would buy from a Cookie Cafe when we all worked together. Good times! Miss you, girls.

So a few weekends ago I set out to bake. Despite the 100 degree weather.

But as always, I just had to make a few changes. I decided to make two different batches: one with pistachios, cherries and white chocolate chips and another with walnuts, cherries and semi-sweet chocolate chips. Variety is the spice of life, right?

Since this is not a recipe I invented, I'm not reposting the recipe. I'll just summarize it. But you can find the specifics here.

Here are my mix-ins:

You basically combine dry ingredients and wet ingredients in separate bowls. Make sure the butter is at room temperature.

You then combine the ingredients from both bowls together. At this point, I divided the cookie better in two and added my mix-ins to each half.

pistachio/white chocolate chips/dry cherries

walnuts/semi-sweet chocolate chips/dry cherries

Then, instead of making the cookies right away, I rolled the cookie dough into two logs, and put them in the freezer for 30 minutes. Similar to what I did with Joe Yonan's Pistachio Cookies. This not only hardens the dough so that your cookies don't spread too much during baking, but it also allows you to bake just a few cookies at a time and save the rest of the dough for later. This is a great trick when you live alone and don't want to be stuck eating a few dozen of cookies solo. Trust me!

Here's the final product. What can I say? I'm slightly obsessed with using the Chinese container for photographing my food. I think it makes the cookies look especially adorable.

I ended up liking the walnut/cherry/semi-sweet combination better. However, I think if I had a better quality white chocolate chips, that would have really helped because I do love pistachios.

Something to be aware of: when you will be mixing the cookie dough with all of the mix-ins, you might panic. I panicked. Why? Because it seems like there is just too much "extra stuff" and not enough dough. And since you don't have Anna's number (or mine), I'm just going to tell you: trust the recipe. It will all work out at the end. {Of course I called Anna and panicked and she told me to calm down, bake the cookies and trust her. She was right.}

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comments:

Pecans and walnuts are faves in cookies, along with cinnamon or lemon zest. Chocolate chips never disappoint, although the bittersweet chunks are especially delicious. Hope you have plenty of dough left to make more cookies.

Yum! I can't have walnuts (so sad), but wonder if I might like a dark chocolate/cherry/almond?? Can you taste the cherry? That is my only pet peeve about choc/cherry baked goods sometimes...that you lose the cherry flavor. Now, this is stuck in MY brain!